Matthew Cleary investigates the political sources of improved government responsiveness in contemporary Mexico. He draws on existing theoretical frameworks that explain responsiveness (the degree to which government output matches public preferences) as a function of electoral accountability mechanisms, direct participatory pressure, or a combination of the two. Cleary demonstrates that electoral competition is not the cause of improved responsiveness among Mexican municipal governments. Instead, he attributes responsiveness in the 1980s and 1990s to a prior qualitative shift in participatory politics that began in the 1970s and continues to this day. The inability of electoral competition to improve responsiveness is, Cleary argues, a function of Mexico's political institutions. The book demonstrates the implications of thinking broadly about the variety of strategies that citizens use, on a daily basis, to influence the behavior of politicians. The Sources of Democratic Responsiveness in Mexico exposes serious flaws in conventional understandings of electoral competition in Mexico. Cleary's careful critique of electoral accountability theory and his theory of participatory responsiveness address broader theoretical and conceptual issues that extend beyond the Mexican situation.

"This book broadens our understanding of democracy in Mexico beyond the electoral arena and identifies some of the main challenges for defending and expanding democratic rights."--Neil Harvey, New Mexico State University.

This volume highlights the growing disjuncture between Mexico's recently accelerated transition to democracy at the national level and what is occurring at the state and local levels in many parts of the country. Subnational political regimes controlled by hard-line antidemocratic elements linked to the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) remain important in late-twentieth-century Mexico, even in an era of much-intensified interparty competition. The survival and even strengthening of state and local authoritarian enclaves in states like Puebla, Tabasco, Guerrero, Oaxaca, Chiapas, and the Yucatan raises serious questions: To what extent will failure to democratize in states and localities where little or no political change has occurred constrain or disrupt the national-level democratization process? How can Mexican leaders engineer a deconcentration of political power and a fiscal decentralization that do not simply strengthen authoritarian elites in the periphery?Drawing on recent field research in ten Mexican states, the contributors show how the increasingly uneven character of democratization in Mexico can be a significant obstacle to the completion of the process in an expeditious and lowconflict manner.

An exploration of the consequences of democratic politics in Mexico. Focusing on struggles at the subnational level, the author assesses how increased electoral competition alters the long-term distribution of power across political instituions in ways that shift power away from established elites.

Based on two surveys carried out throughout Mexico in 2009 and 2011, examines Mexico's democratization at the national and subnational levels.